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UCLA’s freshman seminar, Fiat Lux, partners with student-run Bearing Witness program to bring holocaust survivors to UCLA At age 15, Ann Signett was surrounded by war. Every morning she would go out on her balcony and watch B17 bombers as they flew over her hometown of Rome during World War II. Knowing that German occupation […]

BY LIA BROZGAL AND SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN | PUBLISHED FEB 14, 2018 The #MeToo movement has jump-started crucial conversations about sexual harassment and sexual violence in the contemporary world — and in the Jewish community. Historical and literary perspectives help us make sense of the present moment. After all, Jewish girls and women — like any […]

UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish studies honored author and educator Rabbi Elliot Dorff with the organization’s inaugural Leve Award Oct. 24 in Royce Hall. Dorff, currently the rector of American Jewish University, distinguished professor of philosophy, and visiting professor in UCLA’s School of Law is recognized for his significant public service and leadership in […]

by Aomar Boum I never envisaged that my life journey would take me to study the Jews of my southern Moroccan oases and North Africa. Growing up as a practicing Muslim in a Moroccan village, I never could have imagined that I would, one day, do research with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Vichy and […]

By David N. Myers In a stunning twist of historical fate, Germany has assumed the mantle of conscience of the world. How dramatic a shift this is from the not-too-distant past when Germany was guilty of unprecedented crimes against humanity. A series of German leaders, from Konrad Adenauer to Willy Brandt to Helmut Kohl to […]

By David N. Myers In the cascade of one major news story after another, President Donald Trump has decided somewhat quietly to send his son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kusher, along with chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt, back to the Middle East to try to revive peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. While the chances of […]

By Todd Samuel Presner As a scholar of German-Jewish history, I’m reluctant to make overstated analogies with the past. But if I had to suggest a parallel, I would start in Munich in 1923. The Nazi party, founded three years earlier out of the political disillusionment of Germany’s loss in World War I, started […]

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French. Ninette’s author, Vitalis Danon, arrived in Tunisia under the aegis of the Franco-Jewish organization the Alliance Israélite Universelle and quickly adopted—and was adopted by—the local community. Ninette is an unlikely protagonist: Compelled by poverty to […]

January 31, 2017 As Jewish Studies faculty at UCLA, we condemn the recent Executive Order by President Trump to deny access to immigrants and refugees from seven, predominantly Muslim countries. As scholars of the Jewish past, we know all too well what the consequences have been when Jews have been denied entry to countries merely […]

Sarah Abrevaya Stein, UCLA professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, is the winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic culture. The Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy is given to the winner of this category by the Jewish Book Council, which […]